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A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury. This week I take a look at the always freighted conversation within Left and Liberal circles over race and class. That argument https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html?smid=tw-share #thread
2. became tangible as a preeminent socialist scholar, Adolph Reed of the U of Pennsylvania, was to give a talk to Democratic Socialists of America arguing the intense focus on racial disparities in coronavirus obscured more than it revealed. Here is a piece of his on
3. this subject (see below): https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/04/disparity-ideology-coronavirus-and-danger-return-racial-medicine
4. Word of his talk caused an uproar at DSA with denunciations of Reed's talk as the group's AfroSocialist Caucus said it was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.” Oh, and "cowardly" too. In the end, the Speech was cancelled.
5. This comes as many Left and Liberal scholars argue that our disparities in health, police brutality, wealth inequality are due primarily to a history of racism and white supremacy. Race is America’s primal wound. Princeton scholar and DSA member @KeeangaYamahtta by no means
6. dismisses class but says: "We want to win white people to an understanding of how their racism has fundamentally distorted the lives of Black people.”And she has written on such subjects: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/black-lives-matter-laquan-mcdonald-mike-brown-eric-garner
7. To this, Reed and colleagues such as Cornel West, historians Barbara Fields and Toure Reed, and Jacobin Magazine editor Bhaskar Sunkara argue that "the most powerful progressive movements take root in the fight for universal programs.
8 “An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Professor Reed told me. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”
There's much to read here,
There's much to read here,
9 from Toure Reed's new book "Towards Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism" to @benburgis, a left writer and philosopher, who spoke of Reed's canceled talk here:
10. Toure Reed has a piece on this in Jacobin: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/race-neoliberallism-covid-19-class-struggle . And there is Barbara Fields book "Racecraft", which is well worth a read.
11. @jacobin has a good reading list that covers some of the ideological waterfront, which I've included below. It's a complicated textured debate and worth following some of the strands of it https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/07/racial-justice-reading-list-protests-2020
